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The East Coast gets a bit of a blizzard (I live in DC but am from Minnesota). People start saying, "Global warming?! HA!"

Meanwhile Sagar Island shrinks away from rising oceans.

Meanwhile a UAB professor claims ocean acidification is yet another measurable effect of climate change.

Meanwhile Eastern Antarctica (the steadfast 'unaffected' part of Antarctica) begins to show signs of melting (via NASA and U of TX).

Feel free to keep using your local area to prove/disprove climate change. One day the facts will pile up ...

``1 dinosaur radio station has way more listeners than all your internet radio stations all rolled together have.``

That's not correct. There are many internet stations that have more listeners than a single AM/FM station. The numbers you want to compare is a AM or FM's AQH persons to a net stations average concurrent listeners. Not AQH share (which is the percentage of all people currently listening to radio listening to a particular station). For example, WBUR Boston, one of the higher rated stations in Boston, is about 40,000 listeners during drive time. Now for comparison, at this time of night (midnight PST), the combined listeners to the top 20 on Shoutcast.com is over 40,000. That's just the top 20.

A large interent station (say, one of the most popular DI.FM streams, or Club 977 for example) can have more listeners than a top 5 station in a medium size market like Jacksonville, FL.

And that's not even counting music services like AOL, Last.FM and Pandora.

Radio does work well for some segments of the community. But it's a dying breed, largely due to lack of compelling programming. And if you have internet in your car, listening to net radio you can get your traffic and weather online as well. You don't need to wait for it to come on. Heck, your traffic will be integrated with your GPS. Why do you need to listen to someone read a 5 minute out of date traffic report to you when you can have an instant online version?

Really, I just listen to HD streaming radio these days. Specifically, WCPE (classical music) and NPR Boston both publish in OGG Vorbis, which is great.

If you need, you can download it as a podcast.

They're just a company, not a religion, and they make a great product.

Real audio was a mature technology when they (NPR) first signed on for their service. It has served them well. If you want them to consider free alternatives, make a presentation to them.

Exactly. Look at what happened with Car Talk (story one, story two). Click & Clack didn't like the way that Real tries to abuse their users either, so they reluctantly tried switching to Windows Media instead, knowing that this solution wasn't much better. After getting lots of complaints, they switched back to Real, but not before getting Real to relax on some of their policies.

And you may have other options, as well. In Boston, WBUR provides streams in each of RealAudio, Windows Media, and Quicktime, and even goes so far as to tell users how to listen to the station through iTunes (or, but they don't quite spell this out, any other player that can take an MPEG-4 URL as a stream source).

But if these formats aren't enough for you, and you've just got to have these shows in your format of choice (and you're using a Mac, but I think we can take that as given if you're an NPR junkie :-), then maybe you should take a look at Audio Hijack, which is a neat little program for, either on-demand or on a schedule, starting up an audio stream in your player of choice (or the site's player of choice, as the case may be) and capturing the output as AIFF files. (Actually, it does far more, and can record any audio on your Mac, but I'm trying to stay focused on internet audio here.) These files can in turn be converted by a program like Amadeus II or LAME into MP3 or OGG or what have you; Audio Hijack can even fire off the converter program for you automatically if you want it to. The audio quality of a Real->AIFF->MP3 recording may not be anything spectacular, but for talk radio this isn't such a bad compromise (hint: an episode of This American Life averages around 30mb this way). For a year or two now, I've been idly wondering how to do a decent TiVo for radio on my computer, and now with this I think I've found a pretty good solution...

Real audio was a mature technology when they (NPR) first signed on for their service. It has served them well. If you want them to consider free alternatives, make a presentation to them.

Exactly. Look at what happened with Car Talk (story one, story two). Click & Clack didn't like the way that Real tries to abuse their users either, so they reluctantly tried switching to Windows Media instead, knowing that this solution wasn't much better. After getting lots of complaints, they switched back to Real, but not before getting Real to relax on some of their policies.

And you may have other options, as well. In Boston, WBUR provides streams in each of RealAudio, Windows Media, and Quicktime, and even goes so far as to tell users how to listen to the station through iTunes (or, but they don't quite spell this out, any other player that can take an MPEG-4 URL as a stream source).

But if these formats aren't enough for you, and you've just got to have these shows in your format of choice (and you're using a Mac, but I think we can take that as given if you're an NPR junkie :-), then maybe you should take a look at Audio Hijack, which is a neat little program for, either on-demand or on a schedule, starting up an audio stream in your player of choice (or the site's player of choice, as the case may be) and capturing the output as AIFF files. (Actually, it does far more, and can record any audio on your Mac, but I'm trying to stay focused on internet audio here.) These files can in turn be converted by a program like Amadeus II or LAME into MP3 or OGG or what have you; Audio Hijack can even fire off the converter program for you automatically if you want it to. The audio quality of a Real->AIFF->MP3 recording may not be anything spectacular, but for talk radio this isn't such a bad compromise (hint: an episode of This American Life averages around 30mb this way). For a year or two now, I've been idly wondering how to do a decent TiVo for radio on my computer, and now with this I think I've found a pretty good solution...

One issue I've not read in the articles posted here is the one concerning the toxicity of nano materials, such as buckyballs.

Also, right now on wbur is a BBC documentary on nanotech.

We do also have Quicktime and WindowsMedia. Available here. And we're the ones that originate Car Talk, among others.

-T

To go beyond that, read & listen. When Christopher Lydon used to do the public radio show The Connection from WBUR in Boston, he used to do lots of great jazz shows. The ones on Kind of Blue & A Love Supreme greatly deepend my appreciation of what was already two of my favorite albums, and Lydon's enthusiasm for the music also got me interested in hearing more from people like Count Basie and others. Thanks to the magic of RealAudio and the generosity of Boston University, you can still listen to these great radio shows today. On a similar note, NPR's Curious Listeners Guide to Jazz looks like a pretty good overview of the genre but deeper conniseurs than me might disagree about that one.

Really though, the library is the best thing. Check out everything you can, make a note of what you like & what doesn't do anything for you, and focus on the artists & time periods that you like the best. For me, the stuff from the late 40s (Davis' "Rebirth of the Cool", 1948 [?]) through the late 50s (1959 gave us Davis' "Kind of Blue", Mingus' "Mingus Ah Um" & "Blues & Roots", and Coltrane's "Giant Steps" -- four of my favorites) and into the early 60s (Contrane's "Blue Train", 1961) seems to have been the golden age of jazz. Before that was a lot of big band & swing (fun, but not as personally satisfying to me) and after that came a lot of avant garde & psychedelic stuff that I only care for in small doses.

As for whether you'll like modern stuff, I dunno. The 60s & 70s seemed to bring a lot of psychedelic free jazz & funk, but personally I haven't yet found anything from that era or since that has won me over. The closest thing I can find to modern jazz that I like is Martin Medesky & Wood, who in some ways do an interesting blend of that older cool jazz mixed well with modern hip hop -- making me wonder just what John Coltrane would have done if anyone thought to have a DJ in a band back in the 60s. My problem with MMW though is the whole hippie jam band thing, which I find great for naptime. Oh well. The other modern jazz person I've found to be consistently interesting is John Zorn; if you've ever heard Mr Bungle's albums and tried to puzzle out how they got to be so different from what Faith No More did, blame/thank John Zorn. To the extent that the first Bungle album didn't sound like "The Real Thing", to my ear it's almost all Zorn's influence (he produced the album). This stuff is fascinating to listen to, but it can barely be described as music in any conventional sense: his Cobra album seems to go out of its way to discard rhythm, melody, harmony & tempo -- it's just vaguely organized bursts of sound on disc. Very very weird.

Bonus points: compare & contrast the album cover for "Blue Train" with that of one of the Cowboy Bebop DVDs -- the cover art & logo are similar, and the back cover tiny font text are like mirrors of each other. First time I ever got a chance to see Cowboy Bebop (again, at the library -- I don't have cable tv :), I could tell just from the cover that the people that did this had excellent taste :) :) :)

Anyway, this is al

I don't find my local NPR affilliate, WBUR in Boston to be slanted at all. It is the most intelligent, thoughtful source of news and discussion I've been able to find ANYWHERE.

Granted they don't have a whole lot of sympathy for the neanderthal conservatism of Bush/Helms etc. but most intelligent people don't either.

90.9 WBUR in Boston is about the only listenable station on my dial, and their Real Audio stream follows me when I'm out of their broadcast range.

WBUR radio.
http://www.wbur.org

The Connection, a nationally syndicated call in show from WBUR in Boston, ran a radio interview with the author this morning.

Click here for The Connection's Pride Before the Fall web page.

Click here for the Real Audio interview.

This isn't relevant to the topic of "Girl Geeks", except for clouding the discussion. Sommers' arguments tend to miss feminist points in a way that looks deliberate to me. Take for instance the that Atlantic Monthly article you linked ...

"today's girls outshine boys" (Sommers' words in my italics) because they "now outnumber boys in student government, in honor societies, on school newspapers, and in debating clubs". The skills practiced here are mostly social, not deeply technical. Actually so are many examples of girls' behavior illustrated in this article -- irrelevant to the subject of math/science education for girls.

Boys as a group probably have a different constellation of needs that aren't being met in the school system (as acknowledged not just by Sommers but by Sommer's feminist whipping girl Carol Gilligan). This doesn't disprove or contradict that girls with potential to excel in technical fields are shortchanged, only that boys are probably shortchanged in different ways.

That Summers chooses to characterize this issue as a "feminist" "War on Boys" strikes me as opportunistic and unnecessary, like she's looking for the big media attention that was given Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe (as opposed to the academics she criticizes but nobody reads). Even her Atlantic Monthly bio lists "tart essays about feminist disingenuousness" as one of her specialties. Nothing wrong with criticism & honest debunking, but she could address this issue without invoking her pet demon.

Sommers makes good points in that there are prejudices against boys, and attention needs to be given in schools to how they socialize, and they have special needs that different from girls. And it's obvious that Sommers care about boys a lot. But I'd be a lot more receptive to what she has to say if she didn't spend so much time vilifying feminism in general, and the American Association of University Women's "fishy" research (not my phrase, or even Sommers' come to think of it) in particular.

Here's a link to an NPR show with Christina Hoff Summers discussing her War Against Boys idea, with RealAudio. The host likes her a lot.
__________

Try WBUR's web cast at http://www.wbur.org/. Sorry, but it's in Windows' streaming format.

Sweetenly, Boston's NPR news station provides a live webcast.

http://www.wbur.org

I'm not sure what the variation in programming is for the local station, but you can't fail with Science Friday.

Do you have proof that L0pht Heavy Inds. do hack individual or business computers for which they do not have permission to? That would be a criminal offense, requiring proof of their guilt, not innocence.

If you look at the past history, their reputation, and listen and read their interviews you will gather that L0pht Heavy Inds. does not hack others non-owned computers. They gather their own gear and set up their own labs. With their positive reputation they have earned I feel stupid even bothering to reply to this, "They're hackers so they must be bad" crap. L0pht is more of a lab/think tank. Some shady characters may affiliate themselves with L0pht in one way or another, but L0pht stays out of trouble in that regard.

I'll provide you with a good interview, but I'm sure it won't convince you anyway. Its pretty difficult to prove a negative anyways.

The Connection Interview

You can listen to the show (for the next 2 weeks) here

Bravery, Kindness, Clarity, Honesty, Compassion, Generosity

You can listen to the show (for the next 2 weeks) here

Bravery, Kindness, Clarity, Honesty, Compassion, Generosity

I was immediately sucked in by the show, but since I missed the beginning, I probably didn't get her official explanation of memes. What I did hear dissapointed me. It seemed that the definition of meme was constantly shifting and becoming more encompassing as the show went on, until a meme was practically anything we remembered.

Based on the little I know, memes most definitely exist; the very idea of memes is itself a meme: QED. Still, I have trouble with her premise that it's the memes themselves that are the active entities - that the evolution of human brains was influenced by memes so it would perpetuate and proagate memes. You know, like the one that goes "Human beings were created by water to transport it uphill." (Unix fortune)

The hypothesis is certainly a clever one, but it doesn't mean it's correct. I like to believe that atoms are really little solar systems, complete with entire civilizations. Believe me, it explains so many things! ;-)

By the way, was it William S. Burroughs who first came up with the idea that language is a virus (in Nova Express, or The Ticket That Exploded) or was it Laurie Anderson? And where did she get the idea?

What they DON'T much want anymore are MID-LIST writers. Quirky scribblers. Ones with faithful but not mammoth audiences. Ones difficult to sum up to a salesman in Paducah with a one-sentence soundbite. Ones PEOPLE magazine isn't talking about. Ones whose books haven't been a hit movie yet. Ones whose works not only reward, but REQUIRE a high-school education and some imagination.